


Between the Lines

by cells55



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 21:45:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1526816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cells55/pseuds/cells55
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set a few days after AOAAG. Danny finds Mindy in the break room, looking a little distracted...<br/>Prompted by an anon on Tumblr, brought to my attention by alittlenutjob. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Lines

When Danny wandered into the breakroom for his usual mid-morning apple - he's not sugar-addicted like the rest of them, he can resist temptation - she was sat there, frantically counting on her fingers and muttering to herself. More alarmingly, there was an untouched banana muffin sat in front of her.

"What's up?" he asked curiously, even though it didn't seem his place anymore. He wanted it to be his place, but, he'd made his own bed and now he had to lie in it. Jesus, Castellano, don't think about beds -

Her reply interrupted his train of thought. "Oh, um, nothing. It's all good," she replied, as brightly as she could. "All good in the hood, you know?"

He frowned. "What hood?"

"It's - never mind," she shook her head. "I just. Um..." She looked up at him cautiously. "I don't think this is something for you and I to talk about."

He sighed, sinking in to the chair opposite hers. "C'mon, Mindy. You can say anything you want to me."

She hesitated, staring at him with a mixture of distrust and, probably, desperation to speak her mind.

"Seriously. Friends talk, right?"

It didn't take long for her resolution to fold. "Okay. Well...I guess I'm..." her gaze darted to the door. "I'm a couple days late, and the other day I realised I've been a little, shall we say, haphazard with my birth control?"

Although his face remained the same, inside, his heart dropped straight through to his feet. "Okay," he replied, for all the world sounding calm, assured, like this wasn't a massive sledgehammer to his face. "So you might be..."

"...yeah," she sighed, her head in her hands. "I mean, it's a small possibility, it's not like I've been...celibate, since...and I'm not always totally regular, but - "

"Okay, well, I don't need the full details of your cycle," he interjected.

She lifted her head with the sole intention of rolling her eyes at him. "Oh, grow up, Danny. You're a freakin' _gynaecologist_ , for God's sake."

"I'm sorry," he held his hands up briefly. "Okay. Have you taken a test yet?"

"No, it only just occurred to me that it might be a possibility, I sat down ready to eat and I realised that by this stage of the month I should be craving the triple chocolate muffin, not wasting my time with a fruit based muffin, like, what's the point?"

"So come pee in to a cup, we'll take a look at what's going on," he offered. He really shoulda done theatre at high school, because he was acting the _shit_ out of this. "No big deal."

She wrinkled her nose. "I can't pee in a cup here, Danny! Everyone in the building will know I'm knocked up within fifteen minutes!"

That was true. News, good or bad, travelled faster than light around this place. "Okay, so pee on a stick instead. That's more...discreet. No lab work needed."

She nodded slowly. "A stick. Yeah, I can do that." She met his gaze again. "Thanks, Danny. Keep me company?"

"Hey, whoa, I'm not gonna watch you - "

"Ew, no, I mean wait with me in my office while the thing cooks," she threw him a disgusted look. "Perv."

"Fine, fine," he stood up, and she followed suit. "Let's do this, then."

She disappeared to the bathroom with one of the kits they kept in the stock cupboard, and returned a few minutes later, pulling the stick out of her lab coat pocket. "I'm gonna have to wash the living crap out of this coat. I can't have pee-pockets." She sat at her desk, then looked over at him. "It's kinda fun peeing on things, though, Danny. Are you bummed guys don't get to do it?"

He raised his eyebrows dubiously at her. "I can't say it's crossed my mind."

She nodded, falling quiet. That was always how you knew something was wrong with Mindy Lahiri; quiet was not her default setting. Unless her mouth was occupied with other things, in which case -

He swallowed hard, not wanting to get side-tracked with those thoughts right now, not when she was waiting to find out if some random jerk from a one night stand had impregnated her. Some jerk who probably wouldn't even remember her name, who wouldn't know what he'd had and would never bother trying to find out. He looked up, feeling the compulsion to say something, anything, that might give her some comfort. "You know, Min...no matter what the stick says...I'm here for you."

She dragged herself away from a staring match with the stick; was he imagining that there was a sheen of tears in her eyes? "Thank you..."

He hadn't known how long three minutes really was until he'd sat there, mostly in silence, waiting for a piece of plastic to tell him his future. _Her_ future.

"Time's up," she said at last, and forced herself to sit up straight. She looked at Danny, then down at the stick.

Silence.

"Well?" Danny asked, trying not twitch in his seat.

She closed her eyes, and flopped back in her chair. "One line," she breathed. "One line, Danny."

He stood up, moving closer to check. "What does one line mean again?"

"Not pregnant."

**********

He found her in the bathroom, staring at her reflection in the mirror. She started a little on catching his reflection there, too. "Danny! I didn't hear you come in..."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you." He wrapped his arms round her waist, resting his cheek against hers as he met her gaze in the mirror. "You okay?"

"Me? Yes! Of course," she replied, and he knew her well enough by now - in every way possible, not to be crude, but it was true - to know that something was off. "Can't a girl gaze lovingly at her own reflection once in a while?"

"Of course," he tilted his head to press a kiss to her earlobe. "Especially with a reflection like yours."

That lifted more of a smile out of her. "Nice line, Casanova."

"Not a line if it's true," he grinned, and let go to turn her around to face him. "You sure you're okay?"

"Totally," she confirmed. It was sweet she thought she could convince him otherwise. "I was gonna make dinner, but then I remembered that article I read online about the plight of Chinese takeout places in the city, and I thought, you know what, it would be so selfish of us to cook our own meal when we could be helping out people who really need it by ordering in instead."

He gave her a soft, indulgent smile. "You're a martyr, Min."

"I know," she sighed fondly. "Just one of my many crosses to bear."

"I guess we should find the menu, then." He took her hand and led the way out to the kitchen. "What are you in the mood for? Peppercorn chilli chicken?"

She puckered her lips. "Hmm. No."

Huh. "Never thought I'd see the day you didn't want that," he remarked. "Okay, how about the satay beef?"

"Okay." "Shredded duck with noodles?"

"Sure."

"Egg rolls?"

She rolled her eyes. "Obviously."

"And the beef in black bean sauce is usually a safe bet. You want that mango dessert you like?"

"I think I'm pregnant."

He looked up sharply. "Wait, what?"

"And actually I don't want the duck. It's way too strong tasting. Ducks are for feeding, not eating. C'mon, Danny, I thought you knew that about me."

"You think you're pregnant?" he asked, dropping the takeout menu on the counter.

She responded with a heavy sigh, pausing a moment. "Look, we're married, we have _a lot_ of sex - like, exhausting amounts, not that I mind - it's not totally out of the realm of possibility, is it?"

"I never said it was," he pointed out, closing the gap between them. "I'm not freaking out. Are _you_ freaking out?"

"No!" She bit her lip. "Maybe, a tiny bit. I know we said we'd give ourselves a couple of years being married first, you know, settle in to things before we started a family..."

He cupped her face in his hands, directing her gaze back to his. "We said that. But, Min...we've said _a lot_ of things. And...plans can change."

"They can?" Her voice was unnaturally small; it made his heart ache a little.

"Of course they can." He pressed a reassuring kiss to her forehead, before pulling back a bit. "Okay, so, you _think_ you're pregnant - that means you haven't actually checked yet?"

"I bought a test on my way home," she confessed. "But it's just been, like, radiating nuclear pulses from inside my purse since then."

"So you have some peeing to do, then," he took her hand, and guided them through the living room (grabbing her purse on the way) back in to the bathroom. "Have you been drinking? Do I need to get you to chug that bottle of OJ in the refrigerator?"

"I've been drinking, dude. Chill," she sighed, and gave him a look. "Well, don't just stand there!"

"Okay, okay," he retreated to their bedroom, but left the door open. It was their concession to intimacy; they didn't need to see each other use the toilet, but Mindy liked to keep up any threads of conversation. She said she liked that it made the bathroom a more social place to be, instead of dead space like before.

After flopping down on the bed, he spoke again. "Jeremy and Betsy went out again, by the way. They think they're being sneaky."

He could picture her rolling her eyes. "God, it's so sad. They have nothing on us during our secretive phase. They could not be more obvious."

"I guess they want to keep it out of the public eye."

"Well we all know that's your thing, too," she replied. "Mr 'Be Cool'."

"Okay, you gotta stop using that as a bat to smack me with, Min," he smirked. "I married you, didn't I?"

"Mmm, and how."

He laughed. "Tone it down. This isn't appropriate when you're urinating on the prediction of our future child."

She appeared in the doorway, looking a little anxious again. "Please don't say 'urinating' again. It's creepy."

He filed it away along with other words that Mindy didn't like, now banned from his vocabulary. "I'm sorry." He stood up, holding his hand out to her, and she moved in to his arms like a magnet. "So, three minutes?"

"Three minutes." She buried her face in his chest. "This is a familiar situation."

He searched his memory for why, then nodded. "Except this time I'm hoping for a different outcome."

She sighed, her body tensing a little. "Me too."

Somehow, three minutes seemed even longer than ever, and you'd think that these damn companies would've landed on the technology to speed things up by now. He'd never been particularly patient.

"I think that's time," he said eventually, and ducked his head to dot a few, gentle kisses to her neck. "I love you."

She pulled back, and gave him a small, warm, nervous smile. "Stop trying to get me in to your bed, Castellano. That's what got us here to begin with."

"Technically, it's _our_ bed."

She waved a hand dismissively, heading back to the bathroom; she reappeared in the doorway a moment later, stick in hand.

He couldn't read the expression on her face. "So...?"

She met his gaze, and a smile spread across her features like sunlight. "Two lines."

He felt a wonderful swell in his chest, but he had to check: "Two lines means - "

"Yep," and she held her hand up for a high five. "I'm pregnant."

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, I don't want ML to be pregnant on the show, but enough little hints have been dropped for it to be a semi-decent theory. Anyway, if it were to happen, I'd hope it would be something like this. :)  
> As ever, your feedback is really appreciated, and you can find me on Tumblr here: cesays.tumblr.com.  
> Enjoy!  
> \- C x


End file.
